I was asked to { Verb 'p6l' } the idea of types providing context, and
well, here it is.(We got at these thoughts from a discussion of a hypothetic lexical pragma to disable automatic coercion, which I thought was a bad idea because that's practically to ignore context, Perl's strongest language feature (imo). Instead, if you don't want something to coerce, be explicit: $foo.does(Blah) or fail;, or even: $foo.isa(Blah) or fail;.) Some types can coerce into eachother. This happens transparently because of context. The simplest example I can think of is a Num, that in Int context is coerced to an int. Lossily, but that's not my point right now. my Int $int = $num; Explicit coercion, however, isn't done with context: it is done with the .as() method: $num.as(Int). I think that's weird. Why not see "bare" types as functions that create context? We'd then have Int $num, Int($num), and automatically, $num.Int. All are easy to recognise because of the capital I. Is this weird syntax? Perhaps so, but we've known it from undef for ages. undef without arguments is just undef, but when you give it arguments, it suddenly actually *does* something. undef($foo) makes $foo undef, undef() just returns undef. Compare with: Int($foo) makes $foo Int, Int() just returns ::Int. Of course, for this comparison to work, undef would have to be a type. Which makes having interisting undefs easier: they'd be parametrized types. And undef could simply provide undef context, in which every scalar coerces to... undef. But mutating, of course. I don't think it would be a problem to have undef be a little special. ucfirst Undef could be a non-mutating form, if consistency here is important. Miscellaneous remarks: - There would no longer be a need for int(), as Int() suffices. I'm assuming that you only get to have a system native value in a typed variable. - The reason for having both Scalar() and item() is that Scalar() coerces: afterwards, a Num is no longer a Num. - We agreed that there have to be two ways (at least) to test for ability to coerce, as this can happen lossily and losslessly. Thinks like $foo.canbe(Int) and $foo.fitsin(Int) came to mind, but single word method names are probably better, if only someone can think of any. Juerd -- http://convolution.nl/maak_juerd_blij.html http://convolution.nl/make_juerd_happy.html http://convolution.nl/gajigu_juerd_n.html
